WASHINGTON — United Launch Alliance plans to increase its activities in the commercial launch market using both the current Atlas and future Vulcan rockets, while acknowledging that the U.S. government will remain its major customer for the foreseeable future. Speaking on a panel at the Satellite 2018 conference here March 12, ULA president and chief executive Tory Bruno said it was devoting more attention to the commercial market because the company no longer had to help the U.S. government solve a “crisis” of national security space launches. “We’ve done our…

WASHINGTON — Blue Origin has added a fourth customer to its launch manifest for the still-in-development New Glenn rocket. “We are honored to have SKY Perfect JSAT as a customer for an early New Glenn launch,” Bob Smith, Blue Origin’s chief executive, told SpaceNews. “They are the biggest commercial satellite operator in Asia and highly respected. The whole team at Blue thanks SKY Perfect JSAT for placing its trust in us to take them to orbit.” The Jeff Bezos-owned company also announced March 12 that mu Space, a Thai startup,…

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — As Blue Origin continues tests of its BE-4 engine, United Launch Alliance is keeping quiet about when it might select that engine or an alternative for its Vulcan rocket. Blue Origin started testing of the BE-4 in October 2017 at its West Texas test site. The company has disclosed few details about the status of that test program since then, but a company official said at the 45th Space Congress here Feb. 28 that the company was making “good progress” on tests of the engine. “We’re…

You’re reading the SN Military.Space newsletter published Tuesdays. Sign up here for your free subscription. HOT TOPIC: Air Force makes bold modernization moves. Boeing, Northrop Grumman weigh whether to challenge Lockheed for GPS 3 For those who have been waiting for the Air Force to shake up its space investment portfolio, the budget request for 2019 was as disruptive as can be expected from the military. Money was taken from legacy programs to fund next-generation systems. This is what many “new space” companies and commercial tech firms have been hoping…

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force and Aerojet Rocketdyne are working to revise an agreement to support development of the company’s AR1 rocket engine, as questions continue about the engine’s long-term future. In a Feb. 14 response to questions submitted by SpaceNews, the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) confirmed that Aerojet Rocketdyne is seeking to revise the Rocket Propulsion System (RPS) award the company received in 2016 to reduce the fraction of development costs the company has to pay. That award, known as an other transaction authority…

Spolier alert: it’s a superalloy Aerojet Rocketdyne is qualifying for high-performance rocket engines, including the AR1 vying with Blue Origin’s BE-4 to power Vulcan Aerojet Rocketdyne’s success in developing AR1, an engine designed to replace Russian-made RD-180 engines on United Launch Alliance rockets, hinges in part on its use of Mondaloy, a nickel-based superalloy invented in the 1990s by metallurgists Monica Jacinto, then working at Rocketdyne, and Dallis Hardwick from the Rockwell Science Center. Prior to the 1990s, U.S. engine makers shied away from developing oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle engines…

Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster touches down in Texas after a successful test. (Blue Origin Photo) More Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his space venture, Blue Origin, launched the latest version of its New Shepard suborbital spaceship today for the company’s first test flight in 14 months, with an instrumented test dummy seated aboard. “He had a great ride,” Bezos said tonight in a tweet. The uncrewed, straight-up, straight-down trip was conducted at Blue Origin’s testing ground in West Texas. The video that Bezos included with his tweet showed the…

WASHINGTON — United Launch Alliance today selected L3 Technologies to provide avionics and related services for its next-generation Vulcan rocket. L3 expects to provide ULA with more than $1 billion in hardware and serves over the next 10 years, L3 said in a Dec. 4 release. ULA specified that the avionics are for Vulcan Centaur, the first iteration of the rocket that uses a new first stage paired with the existing Centaur upper stage used on the Atlas 5. The second version of that rocket will have the Advanced Cryogenic…

WASHINGTON — The chief executive of United Launch Alliance said Nov. 9 that he doesn’t feel any urgency to select a main engine for his company’s next-generation Vulcan rocket, despite an impending deadline for an Air Force launch competition. During a question-and-answer session after his speech at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon, Bruno declined to give an update on the competition between the BE-4 engine from Blue Origin and the AR1 from Aerojet Rocketdyne to power the first stage of the Vulcan. ULA has long indicted its preferred choice…

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force has provided SpaceX with an additional $40.7 million to support continued development of the company’s Raptor engine. A Defense Department contract announcement Oct. 19 stated that the Air Force was modifying an existing agreement with SpaceX, originally awarded in January 2016, by providing the company with $40.766 million “for the development of the Raptor rocket propulsion system prototype for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program.” The statement didn’t include additional information about the nature of the work other than that it would be completed…